Visual Communication for Social Work Practice

Power, Culture, Analysis

Sonia M. Tascón

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351241953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

How are we to understand how the dominance of visual images and representations in late modernity affects Social Work practice, research and education? Social workers are increasingly using still and moving images to illustrate their work, to create new knowledge, and to further specific groups' interests. As a profession in which communication is central, visual practices are becoming ever more significant as they seek to carry out their work with, and for, the marginalised and disenfranchised.

It is time for the profession to gain more critical, analytical, and practical knowledge of visual culture and communication, in order to use and create images in accordance with its central principle of social justice. That requires an understanding of them beyond representation. As important as this is, it is also where the profession's scholarly work in this area has remained and halted, and thus understanding of the work of images in our practices is limited. In order to more fully understand images and their effects – both ideologically and experientially – social workers need to bring to bear other areas of study such as reception studies, visual phenomenology, and the gaze.

These other analytical frames enable a consideration not only of images per se, but also of their effect on the viewer, the human spectators, and the subjects at the heart of Social Work. By bringing understandings and experiences in Film, Media, and Communications, Visual Communication for Social Work Practice provides the reader with a wide range of critically analytical frames for practitioners, activists, educators, and researchers as they use and create images. This invites a deeper knowledge and familiarity with the power dimensions of the image, thus aligning with the social justice dimension of Social Work. Examples are provided from cinema, popular media, but more importantly from Social Work practitioners themselves to demonstrate what has already been made possible as they create and use images to further the interpersonal, communal, and justice dimensions of their work.

This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and social workers, particularly those with an interest in critical and creative methodologies.

Part I

Framings

1 Just images?

Making visible those made invisible, or, why visual literacy is important to Social Work

Introduction

[V]isual practices are an important part of being human, the production of Social Work knowledge, Social Work practice, and Social Work interaction.… Visual practice communicates meaning through images. We live in worlds saturated with images.… Social Work is engaged in the production of images, workers and their clients inhabit visual cultures (e.g., advertising about medications, PET scans of brains, etc.) that give shape and meaning to everyday interactions.

(Longhofer & Floersch 2012, p. 509)

Jeffery Longhofer and Jerry Floersch wrote this piece as part of a longer discussion about phenomenology and other critical issues in Social Work. I begin my chapter, indeed the book, with that quote from their longer piece, because in it they engage with the need for social workers to have greater knowledge of the visual. Social Work is about ‘working the social’ (Gray & Webb 2009), and visual creativity, but more broadly visual communication, are an integral part of the social. As they say, we are now not only living in worlds saturated with images, they also enable forms of expression that are unique and distinct. In this chapter I want to begin a much-needed discussion about why having a good understanding of visual images, as they communicate and disseminate the world for us, is vital for Social Work. But upon entering this field of study I soon realised that although social workers were using this form of communication, they had been so immersed in language (written and oral) as the recognised register that they had insufficient understanding of the images they were using, and their power. As Patricia Walton comments:

In contrast to the richness and variety of arts applications in related fields, a literature search for references to visual and sensory methods in Social Work suggests that Social Work remains almost entirely fixed on talk and text in seeking to develop and express its understanding of itself.

(2012, p. 725)

In what follows, I want to outline why social workers would want to take a closer look at the images and what they do, and also how they do what social workers are intuitively using them for. This understanding is necessary because images are of the social world and are powerful. Understanding that power is as important as understanding the power of the words we use to refer to our clients, the switching of language codes we use with different groups of people, and the language we open up to our clients to use to help them have a voice and express themselves.

The language of the visual for Social Work

A 6-year-old girl sits in silence in a remote immigration detention centre north of Australia; she has been uncommunicative for many days. Until the moment when she retreated into a world where words became excessive, and voicelessness was all she had, this young girl had asked many questions of the adults around her; she had been a normal inquisitive, experimental, and playful child. Now she is mute, overwhelmed by her parents’ despair, the strangeness of the place, and all the unfamiliar adults who yell alien words. She has little in the way of toys and the children do not come together to play as they would have done in other circumstances; the other children have been struck by a similar malady and do not seek to play with each other. But some kind strangers visit, and she is given some paper and pencils. In 2014, the Australian Human Rights Commission did just this, and the drawings of the children are found here:

www.flickr.com/photos/23930202@N06/sets/72157645938124048/

(AHRC 2014)

Because of the deeply sensitive nature in commissioning these drawings, I cannot reproduce them here, but I urge you to view them; they are powerful. One of them, the fifth one on display fills the entire page, a simple round face coloured yellow with only eyes crying red tears and a downturned mouth, with black vertical bars drawn all along the page. It reminded me of the joy emoji that was chosen by the Oxford Dictionary the year after this little person drew such misery, to be bestowed with the status of word (see below). The joy of the emoji – signal of its wide usage in the Anglophone world – could not have been in starker contrast to the sadness portrayed by this little person, had someone engineered it so.

The image is deeply disturbing. Not only because it is by a child who has little else left with which to communicate, but also because of what has led to its commission. It is a drawing by a child whose parents attempted to seek asylum in Australia but were soundly rejected and placed in immigration detention. Fleeing conflicts those in the ‘host’ nation have never experienced (if one discounts that which has been experienced by its First Nations’ peoples since British colonisation), they find themselves imprisoned for the simple act of soliciting help.

When confronted by such an image as an adult, where does one begin to make sense of the obvious pain the child is experiencing, and expressing? The first reaction is emotional, a swirl of emotions, each of which tells us something is not as it should be, that something has been distorted. Whether we are then moved to reject that initial reaction through a process of cognitive, or moral, justification (for example, if we agree with the policies that place children in such conditions), or we permit empathy to flourish, we have made a decision and an embodied action has taken place; to agree and do nothing about the policies; to disagree and still do nothing; to agree and join others to ensure detention continues; or to disagree and follow this up with other actions, such as sharing the stories with others via social media, or other direct activism. Inaction is still action, but the image forced in us an emotion, one that had to be responded to and actioned. That is the force of the image, its emotional immediacy, which is then followed by cognitive and other forms of rationalisation or embodied actions. Images force us into a reaction, because of their immediacy. In this chapter and in the following chapters, I will explore some of the reasons for the immediacy of the image, but also the various critical aspects of images that we need to be aware of as we deploy them more and more. Visual images need to be of interest to social workers not only because they can express pain when nothing else is available. Images are powerful conveyors of meaning, and this has considerable productive and political possibilities for social workers’ range of practices. Visual images are powerful because they connect with their audiences in particular ways, and this book seeks to explore for Social Work the theoretical and practical possibilities that visual images present, as well as explore them critically.

Exploring images

In late modernity, images are ubiquitous. In 2015, for example, the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year was an emoji, a pictograph of ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ (EOLD 2015). The pictograph is so often used in text messages/social media posts that it gained the status of a new word. Similarly, the word selfie has come into our everyday lexicon in recent years to both express and accommodate the social shifts wrought by the growing culture of visuality, or visual culture. Images are now ubiquitous throughout the globe, they are used to sell us things, inform us of events, and we share our ideas and hopes with images via social media and texts with photos. In July 2016, film critic Catherine Shoard of the Guardian newspaper, commented: ‘Soon we won’t have to worry about plagiarism or mistranslation. Image is growing ever more powerful and people are saying less and less with words’ (Shoard 2016). Consider, as well, how many of you have met or will ever meet your national leader or the growing number of celebrities and public figures, yet feel you ‘know’ them because their images have made their faces, and their worlds, familiar to you. If Benedict Anderson, author of the 1983 book Imagined Communities, was writing today, he would indeed need to mention the manner in which images are helping to cohere (and dismantle) the idea of nation and nationalism, particularly as his term is premised on belonging to a group of people we have never met or are ever likely to meet. Images are often able to transgress linguistic borders of communication and thus are much more amenable to being used to transmit information and knowledge across these barriers. They are, of course, like any other type of communicative function, imbued with cultural knowledge, and so can be used much more readily to impose cultural norms and power hierarchies; without a critical lens, we can find ourselves using them, or consuming them without regard for how they encode this information/power. We are so immersed in images in modern life that we post ourselves online, get to know, or follow, distant and intimate friends or acquaintances, and understand ourselves as part of imagined communities, almost entirely through images. We are now part of imag(in)ed communities. Visual images are coalescing communal, national, and international belonging, and other forms of allegiances, in entirely new ways.

Visual images have been with us ever since humans could draw, whether in the form of human drawings, or as creations/reproductions of humans wielding image-capturing technologies, i.e. cameras. They are growing in impact because of their proliferation due to the widespread availability and access of digital technologies, but images have never been too distant from human existence. Consider, for example, the images of our time – the Afghan girl, the ‘Napalm girl’, Alan Kurdi, Vincent Lingiari with Gough Whitlam – and many others, and most appearing before digital photography was widespread. Each of these enunciates a special historical moment in the Western world; each has had a significant effect in reshaping the discourse on the topic that they illustrate. Each has not only given voice to a particular point of view previously unnoticed or provided the impetus to something already present; in some cases, they have redirected the debates altogether. Each also has a back story in the relationship between photographer (usually male) and subject (usually child or woman) that highlights geopolitical inequalities. The photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, or ‘Napalm girl’, is a case in point (NBC News 2017). The photo of young Kim running down a road screaming, naked, as the effects of napalm ravaged her body, has been credited with helping to end the Vietnam War (Buell 2012; Miller 2004). The image of a young girl screaming in terror, as her skin was being corroded by the chemical, brought a raw viscerality and thereby human consciousness to a political conflict that had generated ongoing opposition in much of the Western world.

That photo confronted those involved in the conflict with the human scale of the destruction being wrought and coalesced all of the opposition into a single image. Often, I will use this photograph to illustrate the power of images to my students, asking them to engage with it more closely and critically. I ask them to think about the photo in terms of their own visceral reactions and why these occur: would they have a similar response to a written description of the same event? I ask them to think about the image’s subject in terms of gender, age, race, and geopolitical relations (of which they are part as audience, to the subject on the photo). I ask them about the narratives it engendered at the time, and those the image connected to, and why it was so powerful in the actions that it generated. Finally, I ask them to think about the relation between viewer of the image – themselves – and the subject of the image, and to consider the power relations involved in: taking the photo, exhibiting the photo, and being viewer (voyeur to suffering?) of the event; in other words, having the permission to take the image, to exhibit it knowing there will be a willing audience, and to decide we can view such a spectacle. These relations are most apparent in the single act of editing, as this decides what we are permitted to view and what is hidden from us. In the official version of this photo, US soldiers to the right of Phan Thi Kim Phuc were edited out because they looked on at her anguish with detachment and disinterest. The unedited photo can be seen here:

www.readingthepictures.org/2013/09/have-you-ever-seen-the-uncroppedversion-of-the-napalm-girl/

(Reading The Pictures 2013)

What is of central interest to this double act of invisibility/visibility that editing carried out in this instance, is that her naked body is allowed to be exposed, while the bodies of armed men who, as a group, caused her pain, were excised from view; their culpability was exorcised through the simple act of editing. Thus, a powerful image became powerful because it exposed the pain that the men caused, yet the cause was not made available to the assumed audience. This one picture could only do its work because it reproduced and sustained a geopolitical relationship, the same one that had enabled the war to be waged and maintained. I turn to the geopolitical dimensions of the sorts of images social workers will likely deal with, humanitarian images, in Chapter 6.

In a more positive vein, I ask my students to think about the events preceding the capturing of this image, which made the effect of the image possible, the protesting and activism that had been taking place for a considerable time; the opposition to the war that had defined an entire generation. I use this photograph often to point out that images are not isolated events, do not ever stand alone, but are part of ongoing and wider discourses (in the Foucauldian sense of discursive developments) (Foucault 1978), taking shape in the public sphere (Habermas 1989). In terms of activism, I also use this photograph to illustrate the need to continue all forms of social change actions and not give up, as at a certain propitious point an image comes along to crystallise all of it, and we can never know when this will happen.

A whole world of people, stories, and political events is enfolded into images, and these are what I would hope to bring to Social Work readers through this book: the sociological, critical, and phenomenological dimensions of images as we create, consume, and select them for our students, for research, and for advocacy. Visual images are a form of human communication, but they are a particular, and powerful, form of human communication that needs to be understood more closely if we are to use them ethically and for social change.

Regarding Social Work and images

Social Work is part of the social within which visual images have developed, and it is often left to caring professions like Social Work to pick up the pieces of the human pain that ‘the Napalm girl’ photo illustrated, and of other institutionalised and discursive practices that lead to harm, invisibility, marginalisation, and disregard. Social workers are using images more and more, to educate new graduates, to create new knowledge as researchers, in practice to help our clients express themselves, and as activists to create social change. Without a closer understanding of visual practices and visual communication, however, social workers can also unwittingly reproduce the very power relations they may be seeking to interrogate with the use of images. As Jeffry Longhofer and Jerry Floersch (2012, p. 509) mention, ‘[s]ocial workers often use the gaze, surveillance practices, and other scopic technologies and practices to look into the lives of others’, a fact that in and of itself should force us to become more cognisant of visual communication and its impacts. As I have mentioned elsewhere (Tascón 2017a), the very act of selecting these images requires a critically analytical lens if we are not to reproduce the same harm illustrated by ‘the Napalm girl’ photo. Without a closer knowledge of the types of messengers that images are, how they transmit, and how they impact on their audiences, we will continue to use them unknowingly, unthinkingly, and not realise their full potential in enabling powerful communication. Although there is a growing engagement with visual images by social workers, there is still a considerable gap in our understanding of the visual, as this understanding impacts directly on our appropriate application. As Longhofer and Floersch (2012, p. 509) go on to state:

Visual practice requires that we pay attention to all the ways that Social Work and Social Work research are involved in the production, circulation, and reception of visual images. This will position Social Work research and practice to interpret the representations that shape the visual constructs of our work; and to pay close attention to how visual codes differ across practice settings and contexts; and to consider how the symbolic constructions of Social Work practice shape how workers see, understand, and participate.

And yet, as the quote by Walton (2012, p. 725) at the beginning of the chapter outlined, the power of the visual remains out of reach of the understanding of most social workers as ‘Social Work remains almost entirely fixed on talk and text in seeking to develop and express its understanding of itself.’ The reasons for that lie largely in the fact of the history of Social Work, its origins in Western modernity and the communication technologies of its early phases; but also involved are the types of knowledge that were deemed to be valid knowledge within modernity for the professions. This chapter excavates this more fully, that is, the epistemological and ontological foundations of the professional discipline of Social Work.

The Social Work of images

In another life separate to Social Work, I have been deeply involved in the establishment, running, and analysis of human rights film, and human rights and activist film festivals in particular (Tascón 2012, 2015, 2017b). In that role, I have closely considered the creative and productive potential for creating social change within the space of a film festival. I have seen at first hand how audiences can be moved emotionally, and then politically and collectively, to help create social change on different issues. Films and film festivals have been used for the purposes of social change, to bring about more equitable structures and discourses, since the early years of the inception o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Framings
• PART II: Practices
• PART III: Reflections
• References
• Index